Documentary Initiative
The Documentary Film Initiative (dfi) is the forum for documentary film in North Rhine-Westphalia. The dfi provides information, research and discussions for the documentary industry, the next generation and the interested public. The dfi is part of the Filmbüro NW , the association of filmmakers in North Rhine-Westphalia with over 200 members. The dfi was founded in 1998. The previous institution until 1997 was the European Documentary Film Institute (EDI). The dfi has been based in Cologne since 2009. Petra Schmitz is in charge.
Events
With an annual multi-day symposium, workshops and film series in cooperation with other film institutions from North Rhine-Westphalia and at the federal level, the dfi offers a platform for dealing with documentary practice. The focus is on current tendencies in artistic documentary film. The central questions of the events apply to aesthetic, content and technical developments and increasingly also to the economic framework conditions of production and evaluation. Documentary filmmakers, producers, distributors, editors and film scholars provide information in the events.
One focus of the dfi's work is to improve the situation of children's documentaries in North Rhine-Westphalia and Germany. There is also a permanent cooperation with the children and youth film section of the Duisburg Film Week and the international children and youth film series doxs kino! Together with doxs, the dfi initiated the children's documentary film project dok you in 2008 .
All results - lectures, discussions and interviews, thematic film lists, research - for all events are documented on the dfi homepage and made accessible through a database.
Book series
The book series »Texts on Documentary Film« published by the dfi offers perspectives and positions of artistic documentary film. There are anthologies on documentary topics as well as monographs with texts by individual documentary filmmakers as well as detailed interviews and workshop discussions. The 14 editions of the "Texts on Documentary Film" were published by Vorwerk 8 (Berlin) and are available in bookshops. The dfi was also involved in the DVD editions of the Edition Filmmuseum "Thomas Heise: Material" and "Gabriele Voss: Slices in Space and Time".
Networks and cooperation partners
Christoph Hübner and Gabriele Voss (documentary filmmaker), Eva Hohenberger (Ruhr University Bochum), Fosco Dubini (filmmaker and producer) and Werner Ružička (director of the Duisburg Film Week) sit on the dfi's advisory board . The dfi is involved in the amalgamation of the film institutions in North Rhine-Westphalia, the Film Culture Network.
Cooperation partners of the dfi are the House of Documentary Film (Stuttgart), the Duisburg Film Week, the children's and youth film section of the Duisburg Film Week, the international women's film festival Dortmund I Cologne, the State Center for Civic Education North Rhine-Westphalia, the Documentary Film Working Group, Cologne Academy of Media Arts (KHM) , the Filmschule (Cologne), the Filmwerkstatt Münster, the Filmmuseum Munich, the Goethe-Institut Munich and the Vorwerk 8 publishing house (Berlin).
The dfi is funded by the Ministry for Family, Children, Youth, Culture and Sport of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Culture Office of the City of Cologne, Culture Office.